These files are her life's work, containing the largest catalog of man's athletic achievements at the edge of the troposphere. Never mind that Hawley hasn't climbed a mountain in her life. She has interviewed, documented, and, when necessary, investigated nearly every expedition coming through Kathmandu since the country opened its doors to outsiders in the mid 1950s. She's also acted as an archival historian, collecting trip reports from as far back as 1905.

With their empire in tatters, postwar Britons were desperate for a source of renewal to pierce their collective mourning; they needed grand projects to restore national pride. They looked eastward, and up. Starting in 1920 the lexicon and tactics of war were applied to the attempts to scout and conquer Everest. Vast expeditions — the first in 1903-4 had taken a load so hefty that 88 porters died of exhaustion — made their way across the Tibetan plateau.

From Village Girl to World Ultramarathon Champion | She has innate talent, but it was her early life that prepared her for such races. After dropping out of school, she worked as a trader carrying upto 28 kg sacks of rice up and down mountains. “Many considered this to be a hard life, but now I see it was really good training,” Rai laughs.
posted by Nevin
on Jul 17, 2015 -
2 comments

An earthquake with a magnitude of 7.8 has hit Nepal, killing over 1,000 people. The epicenter was just outside Kathmandu, but the effects have been felt as far away as Tibet, Bangladesh, and India. Regular updates at The Guardian.
posted by lunasol
on Apr 25, 2015 -
82 comments

Prior to our arrival in Nepal the following day, only one member of our squad had played elephant polo, in a brief exhibition. The rest of us had neither sat atop an elephant nor played horse polo nor spent much time atop a horse. We had "practiced" twice at a windswept parking lot along the beach in Queens, New York, in bitter cold, using mallets fashioned from PVC pipe and riding on top of SUVs in place of elephants. It was funny but not entirely helpful.
posted by ellieBOA
on Mar 18, 2015 -
1 comment

"The aerial cinema experts at Teton Gravity Research release the first ultra HD footage of the Himalayas shot from above 20,000 ft. with the GSS C520 system, the most advanced gyro-stabilized camera system in the world. Filmed from a helicopter with a crew flying from Kathmandu at 4,600 ft. up to 24,000 ft. on supplemental oxygen, these are some of the most stable, crisp, clear aerial shots of these mountains ever released, which include Mt. Everest, Ama Dablam, and Lhotse."
posted by Joakim Ziegler
on Mar 12, 2015 -
19 comments

Kumari in Kathmandu, Nepal: Living pre-pubescent girls are believed to be the earthly manifestations of divine female energy, incarnations of the goddess known as Taleju. There can be as many as 13 Kumari at any one time, and the practice can be dated as far back as the 17th century. At the onset of menses, the Kumari are retired and begin life as mere mortals, experiencing the world for the very first time. [more inside]
posted by St. Peepsburg
on Sep 17, 2014 -
7 comments

The Value of a Sherpa Life - Grayson Schaffer reports on Friday's Everest avalanche that claimed the lives of 16 Sherpas in an instant. "And, yes" he says, "there is something that needs to be done about it." In the wake of this devastating tragedy, many Sherpas are threatening a strike and the government is mulling total closure for the upcoming season, which has 335 permits in the queue. Footage of the avalanche. Previously, in The Disposable Man: A Western History of Sherpas on Everest, Scaheffer spoke of the high risks, low pay and shocking mortality rate: "... no service industry in the world so frequently kills and maims its workers for the benefit of paying clients." [more inside]
posted by madamjujujive
on Apr 21, 2014 -
66 comments

What is life like when having your period puts your health at risk and means you are shunned by society? Rose George reports from Nepal and Bangladesh on menstrual taboos.: Blood speak[more inside]
posted by Joe in Australia
on Mar 18, 2014 -
42 comments

The Walk Free Foundation has released its latest report on the contemporary slave trade, the Global Slavery Index (interactive map). As summarized by Al Jazeera, over 29 million people are in some form of involuntary servitude, ranging from kidnapped fishermen to women forced into prostitution to child brides. The countries with the largest populations of enslaved people include Mauritania, Haiti, Pakistan, India, and Nepal. Back in 2012, J. J. Gould wrote on the difficulties in confronting slavery in today's society: In the West, and particularly in the United States, slavery has long settled in the public imagination as being categorically a thing of the past.... It can mean having a harder time recognizing slavery when it's right in front of us.
posted by Cash4Lead
on Oct 17, 2013 -
12 comments

In 1971, the newly-created US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) hired a bunch of freelance photographers to collectively document environmental issues around the country. They were given free rein to shoot whatever they wanted, and the project, named Documerica, lasted through 1977. After 40 years, the EPA is now encouraging photographers to take current versions of the original Documerica photos and are showcasing them on flickr at State of the Environment. There are location challenges, and a set has been created with some of the submissions, making side-by-side comparisons. [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Aug 8, 2013 -
16 comments

“Sexual orientation does make you poor,” says Manohar Elavarthi, a community organizer with Sangama in Bangalore. “Poverty is not just economic – you miss access to so many things: ration cards, inheritance rights, voter ID cards.” In several South Asian countries, there are reports that LGBT people have even been denied access to disaster relief. And homophobia is intricately connected with other divisions in South Asian societies, particularly around gender but also religion and caste.
Yet I saw many signs of hope and change in both India and Nepal. Those transgender sex workers in Chennai have organized a coalition, called V-CAN, of every single community-based organization in the state of Tamil Nadu that serves homosexual or transgender people. Working with the NGO Praxis, they have been able to gain access to some public benefits, such as pensions and registering as “third gender” on government ID cards. Activists in Nepal’s Blue Diamond Society have achieved similar results and more. ~ World Bank blog post
posted by infini
on Jun 3, 2012 -
9 comments

"Over the past few decades, 160 million women have vanished from East and South Asia — or, to be more accurate, they were never born at all. Throughout the region, the practice of sex selection — prenatal sex screening followed by selective termination of pregnancies — has yielded a generation packed with boys. From a normal level of 105 boys to 100 girls, the ratio has shifted to 120, 150, and, in some cases, nearly 200 boys born for every 100 girls. In some countries, like South Korea, ratios spiked and are now returning to normal. But sex selection is on the rise in Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia, and the Middle East." American journalist Mara Hvistendahl's new book: "Unnatural Selection: Choosing Boys Over Girls, and the Consequences of a World Full of Men," examines and tries to predict the actual and potential effects of unequal sex ratios on men, women and the social economies of the affected regions, including the recent spike in sex trafficking and bride-buying across Asia. More. [more inside]
posted by zarq
on Jun 10, 2011 -
65 comments

Interactive map of international adoptions, from the superlative Schuster Institute
for Investigative Journalism. The site contains an amazing amount of information about corruption in international adoption in countries like Nepal and Vietnam.
posted by the young rope-rider
on Apr 19, 2011 -
18 comments

Jim Corbett's Man Eaters Of Kumaon (1944) is a collection of true stories about the hunt for man-eating tigers and leopards in India. One of Corbett's most notable kills, the Champawat Tiger, was alleged to have killed some 436 people in Nepal and India. Similarly, the Leopard of Panar possibly killed some 400 people in northern India before she was hunted down herself. [more inside]
posted by SpringAquifer
on Feb 25, 2010 -
26 comments

Quality from the Himalayas. Amid continuing civil violence, Nepal has just made a big push to escape poverty through your local Starbucks. Working with Winrock International, Nepal's tea growers are finalizing a Code of Conduct that would eliminate pesticides banned by the EU and commit tea growers to replenishing the soil, using organic fertilizers whenever and wherever possible, and using fair labor and wage practices -- making Nepal Orthodox Tea more environmentally- and worker-friendly than its better-known rival Darjeeling. In the process, they hope to create a gourmet niche product (pdf; go to p. 8) that appeals to the taste and sensibilities of socially-conscious Westerners through a partnership with Tazo (Starbucks' main tea supplier), as well as to modernize the local industry to create greater international awareness of its products.
posted by occhiblu
on Aug 2, 2006 -
17 comments

Mountain Voices. 'This website presents interviews with over 300 people who live in mountain and highland regions round the world. Their testimonies offer a personal perspective on change and development.'
posted by plep
on Apr 10, 2005 -
2 comments

Nepal has been in the news lately (1, 2, 3), as the king ousted the prime minister and replaced the cabinet under protests and a mounting civil war. Airports are closing, newspapers are shutting down, and radio stations are going silent. How'd I find this all out? By reading a blog from someone in Nepal, posting updates of what day-to-day life is like amid the strife.
posted by mathowie
on Feb 15, 2005 -
8 comments

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